Najam Sethi

11 results arranged by date

Ali Chishti, who writes for The Friday Times, has gone public in
Islamabad with details of his abduction and beating last Friday, August 30.
Chishti is making the rounds of TV talk shows describing how he was picked up
in Karachi by uniformed police driving a police vehicle, blindfolded, switched
to another police vehicle, taken to a small room somewhere in Karachi, and
beaten by men he does not think were police officers. After nine hours, he was
dropped by the side of the road at 4:30 Saturday morning.

Introduction

By Bob Dietz

At least 42 journalists have been killed—23 of them murdered—in direct relation to their work in Pakistan in the past decade, CPJ research shows. Not one murder since 2003 has been solved, not a single conviction won. Despite repeated demands from Pakistani and international journalist organizations, not one of these crimes has even been put to a credible trial.

1. The Murder of Wali Khan Babar

On January 13, 2011, Wali Khan Babar, a 28-year-old correspondent for Geo TV, was driving home after covering another day of gang violence in Karachi. Babar was an unusual face on the airwaves: Popular and handsome, he was a Pashtun from Zhob in Baluchistan near the border with Afghanistan. For Geo, it was a rare boon to have a Pashtun in Karachi, and so the station planned to send him abroad for training to become an anchor.

3. Intimidation, Manipulation, and Retribution

A couple of years ago, Hamid Mir, Najam Sethi, Umar Cheema, and other prominent figures in the news media began going public with the threats they were receiving from intelligence agencies. It was a risky calculation, but the silence, they reasoned, encouraged intimidation and allowed impunity to persist.

Conclusion

The murder of Saleem Shahzad in May 2011 galvanized journalists across Pakistan in a way that few other events have. For a short time their power as a “union” was felt. They secured a commission of inquiry. They named ISI officers who had threatened Shahzad and many other journalists. They detailed those encounters in a public record available on the Internet. The resulting report offers a series of promising recommendations, saying in part:

The Friday Times
in Lahore has come under cyberattack. Earlier Friday, its website could not be accessed.

Najam Sethi,
the paper's editor, told CPJ that someone has "launched an attack on the
websites of both The Friday Times and
Vanguard Books [the book publishing
and distribution company that owns the Times].
A tsunami of killer spams and log-ins have clogged the sites and blocked them."

Tags:

In Pakistan, the term "a war of words" can take on a
menacing dimension beyond the metaphorical. Words--written, spoken, or
reported--regularly land journalists in trouble, a very literal, physical
sort of trouble. Reporters have become accustomed to being threatened, and over
the years they've seen threats sometimes build to abductions, beatings, and
even death. Such violence seldom comes without a string of prior warnings.

Tags:

After airing a piece critical of the Pakistani military,
senior journalists Najam Sethi and Hamid Mir received serious threats from what
they described as "both non-state and state actors." Pakistan was the most dangerous country for journalists in 2011
and the CPJ is working to keep these journalists safe by publishing
these threats, bringing them into the public eye and making certain that
those who wish to do harm know that their actions will not go unnoticed.

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We
released a statement Thursday--CPJ
supports Pakistani journalists facing threats--about the decision of two
Pakistani journalists to publicly announce the threats they had been receiving.
Najam Sethi, editor of The Friday Timesand host
of a popular Urdu-language political program on Geo TV, and Jugnu
Mohsin, also a Friday Times editor, said
they had lived under threat for years but the level of danger had become so
menacing in early 2011 that they were forced to leave Pakistan. A few months
later, the two went public with the threats. Then, on Thursday, Sethi told us
that he and Mohsin had decided to return to Lahore on Friday.

Tags:

New York, December 29, 2011--The Committee to Protect Journalists admires and supports the decision of Pakistani journalists Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin to make public the threats that have driven them at times to live outside their country in recent months. Sethi and Mohsin are returning to their home in Lahore and are determined to continue their independent work in the media. They, like other journalists in Pakistan in recent weeks, have opted to openly confront those making the threats, which have come from both state and non-state actors.